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Obituaries

Colin Bennett Keith

BMJ 2021; 372 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n477 (Published 23 February 2021) Cite this as: BMJ 2021;372:n477
  1. Paul Keith

Compassionate, modest and dedicated, Colin Bennett Keith was the epitome of the quiet man who served the community as a general practitioner. He was born into two families with longstanding connections to medicine—the Grogonos and the Prestons—who had trained at the London Hospital in Whitechapel for generations. Both families also shared a love of sailing. The pursuit of both shaped Colin’s life and gave rise to many of his happiest moments.

Colin Bennett Grogono was born in April 1940 and divided his first four years between the family home in Stratford, London, and escaping the blitz to Abingdon and the Preston family home in St Mawes, Cornwall.

Antipathy towards the Axis powers extended to those with Italian sounding names, so his father adopted “Keith” as the family surname and, in 1944, moved to Littlehampton to go into practice with his father-in-law, Arthur Preston.

Colin attended Millfield School, where his housemaster, Robert Bolt—later a celebrated playwright and two-time …

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